The Developement Machine

Power Point

developementmachine — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 15:06:31 +0000

I have never been a big fan of Power Point. My first contact with the Office-program gave me a really bad first impression. I’m not sure that I’ve been fair it might just be that first impression that has clouded my image.

A few minutes after the first slide in the first lecture where I got to see PP-slides airplanes started flying over the projection, letters fell out and exchanged with parts of the next headline. Text got mirrored and there was a clip art frenzy. I truly hated powerpoint.

Now, I’m working in the corporate world and I can honestly say that I can’t see that there is any way I can do that without Power Point. No matter how hard I try, it is more or less a demand from the board that you present with PP. I need Power Point to be able to get my projects running, without it I get no funds.

So, ten years after everyone else I’m starting to learn.

Odds Software

developementmachine — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 14:43:06 +0000

One of my hobbies is statistics and a couple of years ago I spent quite a lot of time trying to build a poker bot software, a combination of both my interest in lots of statistics data and advanced programming. A poker bot, imho, needs 2 parts, a good database with poker data and a really good AI. O know I’m not the first to build a poker bot and I’m definately not the best, I didn’t ever actually finish the project.

There are actually a lot of tools collecting and showing the data in interesting ways today, very few that actually use it for something. My ambition was something similar to this amazing poker odds calculator as base (to be honest I never got even close). I’m actually at the AI part and that was something that came a lot further.

I still do use the Poker Office software though, not for building a bot on it but for getting the data presented with overlay while playing. It’s not really automatic but it is a lot of help as nobody could possibly remember all the stats.

Hosting your own WP or going with WordPress.com?

developementmachine — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:08:24 +0000

One of the big questions on choosing how to set up your blog is always if you should go with your own hosting or hook up with wordpress.com. I would almost always go for my own WP-installation but not always, as you can see. There are pros and cons with both but the biggest pros for your self hosted wordpress is the adaptaion possibilities and the brand awareness factor. If you host your own WP the possibilities to make changes are unlimited, you can make your blog look and work like almost anything you can imagine.

On the other hand, it’s so easy getting started with a wordpress.com blog it’s almost a shame everythime you chose another option. It will take you less than a few minutes to get started AND get traffic to your blog. There are not only a lot of publishers around on wordpress.com but a great amount of readers too and if you tag your posts properly you can definately get quite a few visitors the first few days of blogging.

I chose my own instance of WordPress in 99% of the cases but I do recommend the less experienced users to go with wordpress.com, for that very reason, it’s so simple. You can even with a few clicks get your own domain name.

Forum Software

developementmachine — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 17:35:52 +0000

If you are starting a Forum and don’t know where to turn I have two good options for you, one will cost you a few bucks but is in my opinion a bit better, the other is an open source project and of course free.

We are talking about vBulletin and phpBB. Both run on a PHP machine with MySQL and are both very easy to get started with. vBulletin has a few advantages as it is working better from start and phpBB needs some coding assistance to get moving as you want it too. If you are a skilled php coder it is definately not a problem though.

You can find them here: vBulletin – phpBB

7-zip

developementmachine — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 17:30:59 +0000

When it comes to desktop applications that make your life easier 7-zip is a mong my top picks. It’s nothing fancy, it’s a simple archive application that allows you to pack and unpack files. The good part is that it is extremely small, can handle almost everything from .zip and .rar to the weirder archives. Gotten some sort of weird file you need to unpack? Just install 7-zip and right click on the file and chose unpack here. It’s as simple as that. It also has it own format for packing called .7z. You can find 7-zip here.

Notepad ++

developementmachine — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 17:22:47 +0000

The first post of all on this blog is dedicated to one of my absolute favourite softwares. When it comes to developement for beginners there is nothing equal to Notepad ++. It’s the simplest editor you can find and you can use it for almost anything. It is completely free and it’s open source. If you are just starting building websites or writing simple little java applications you should start with using Notepad ++.

You can find it on Sourceforge here.